The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer

He was Sammy the Bull Gravano’s partner in the killing of Paul Castellano. John Gotti hired him to torture and kill his neighbor. A favorite among all the seven East Coast crime families, Richard “Ice Man” Kuklinski conducted his business with coldhearted intensity. By his own estimate, he murdered over two hundred men, taking enormous pride in his variety and ferocity of technique.

But behind Kuklinski’s trail of murder was a traditional, loving, Catholic family. A married father of three, Kuklinski was always regarded as being especially kind to children; he threw summer block parties in his New Jersey neighborhood, and he was always generous around Christmastime. And before his crimes finally caught up with him, his family never suspected a thing…

From Publishers Weekly

This stomach-turning account of the multiple atrocities committed over 43 years by Richard "The Ice Man" Kuklinski—as sadistic a killer as most readers would ever want to encounter in print—seems like more of an as-told-to than an independent journalistic narrative, though Carlo says that he verified Kuklinski's accounts where possible. But rather than critically assess Kuklinski's largely self-serving tales of his roles in such major mob killings as those of Jimmy Hoffa and Gambino boss Paul Castellano, Carlo (The Night Stalker) seems to accept them. Instead of applying objective insight into how such a murderer—who researched methods that would prolong his victims' suffering—came to be, the author presents instead chapter after chapter of Kuklinski summarily killing criminals he was hired to eliminate or randomly gunning down someone on the street to test out a new weapon. By disregarding the questions raised by Mafia experts such as Jerry Capeci about Kuklinski's credibility, Carlo has fumbled an opportunity. Sloppy errors (e.g., Rudy Giuliani served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, not the Eastern District) also detract from the book, which ends with a bizarre invitation to the reader to write to Kuklinski at the Trenton State Prison.